A similar issue came up, I think in NJ, when a person on welfare called a welfare call center and it was in India. The issues were, couldn’t the person on welfare do this job; tax dollars not putting a US citizen to work but going out of the country. I heard Clinton propose once that there is cheap labor in the Ozarks and someone should figure out how to use it.

I have a relative who works at a University and they fired the secretaries, now you have PhD’s doing the photocopying instead of preparing classes, working with students, and doing research. And why do chancellors have such large salaries and perks, and football coaches Do sports really help Universities? Has anyone ever looked at the PeopleSoft software that is sold to Universities… I think there is more bloat at the K-12 level – schools are so close together (8 blocks maybe in some areas)and each one has its own Principle, VP, staff and office space and equipment to go along.

Isn’t outsourcing a two-way street? If people come to the US to work, couldn’t a US-citizen live and work abroad. Actually I think I’d go to Ireland.

I have to agree with jak’s comment. There are intrinsic problems with the outsourcing model, which allow only a limited set of problems to be successfully transferred to a contractor on the other side of the world. The chaotic, communication-intensive work involved in administration is definitely not a good choice for outsourcing. Besides which, outsourcing by itself creates a new set of problems on both sides of the transaction. (some of which I’m covering on my site, http://outsourcee.blogspot.com ) Your average university management would just crash under the overhead.

ZDNet today mentioned OpenCourseWare being written in India but for some reason did not identify the “east coast university” that purchased it, even though this information is well known. I wonder why.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/index.php?p=561

“From his personal experience, Shenoy drew upon two examples where his company turned to India to produce high quality solutions at a dramatically reduced cost. One was courseware product for a “large east coast university.” When iMC responded to an RFP with a bid that was one-fourth of the price of the competing bids. “Eight weeks later, we had the program installed and running with no quality problems.”

Why not just send everyone to study abroad in India? Whohaa, that way, we pay a lower tuition and still get american people educated… and yes, one might argue that our money goes then to India, but we would still get education in exchange anyways.

> Obviously the entire IT department could be in India.

And when the network port is not working, they’ll fly someone over.
Or when the blade in the switch fails, they’ll just call a janitor over.
Or when 40% of all the PC’s are infected by viruses, they can all just call the help desk, which is a VoiP connection to an Indian call center where a bleary eyed support person with a thick accent will end up talking to an international student with a similarly thick accent from the other side of the world, where they’ll just say “Oh, please drop off your computer at ComSci Hall 102 tomorrow. We’ll ship it over here and fix it. You’ll have it back in two weeks.”

Sure, perhaps there could be some things shipped out, but face it, you’ll need to have front line support on the ground, helping out the people who don’t understand left from right click.

Now, if you just had all the students do the labor… oh wait, then you’d end up with financial software that looks like MUD code. Gah!

Clever article. Of course, this actually assumes that outsourcing would save money. It does, but only if the development process is dysfunctional in the first place.

End user to marketer to business analyst back to end user to spec to marketer to business analyst to developer who meets the spec but produces the wrong application back to business analyst update the spec over to end user back to business analyst to developer… iteration #1.

Yeah, if you’re going to do it this way, I guess you may as well get a cheap price on a developer hour. Problem is, you just paid three salaries for two weeks to save a few hundred bucks on a couple hours of coding.

I still think that they’ll eventually figure this one out.

Lack of innovation in computer science? I suppose so since 90% of what we use daily (gui, mouse, IM, collaboration) was already demoed in the late 60’s…

Of course we’ve been really, really busy getting the masses accustomed to ‘thinking different’ and not just wetting themselves with anxiety when sat in front of a computer screen.

And there really are lots of benefits through efficiency, reduced trip miles, enablement(where _did_ all of those file clerks go?)… More innovation can wait it’s turn to get implemented.

And speaking of innovation, how about innovation in the field of business administration. Most of the trends of the last 30+ years seem to consist of hiding true costs from the balance sheet, or just delaying them until after the current ceo gets their golden parachute.

Yeah, now that’s innovation.

p.s. If you really wanna see some innovation, then go to hell.com (seriously)

lack the initiative to manage staff overseas (or do anything innovative, actually) I’m sorry, shouldn’t that statement be about COMPUTER SCIENTISTS? There’s been soooooooo much innovation in that field, relative to the amount of money invested, right? <thinly veiled sarcasm>

Double-Rats “Pilots-Administration-Pilots” <sigh>

Rats I thought I could improve on the Owen-glitch. Yes my terms are supposed to be one-above-the-other.